The Don Banks Music Box to the Putney: the Genesis and Development of the VCS3 Synthesiser

The Don Banks Music Box to The Putney: The genesis and development of the VCS3 synthesiser JAMES GARDNER Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand Email: [email protected] This article traces the development of the EMS VCS3 by earlier historians of technology (e.g. Ferguson 1974; synthesiser from the inception of its precursor, the Don Banks Pinch and Bijker 1984; von Hippel 1988; Edgerton Music Box, through its prototype to its commercial release. 2007). These authors rightly assert the non-linearity of The nature of the design team and their technical and aesthetic technological developments and argue against an fi choices are also discussed. The VCS3 is signi cant in that it overly teleological approach that sees the ‘successful’, was the first commercial European synthesiser and the team ‘stabilised’ design (here the VCS3) as the ‘inevitable’ that created it – Tristram Cary, David Cockerell and Peter Zinovieff – were key figures in the development of British goal of earlier design work. ‘ ’ electronic music. This detailed study of the genesis of the Instead of such a linear model, Pinch and Bijker VCS3 and some of the factors that influenced its design touches advocate a ‘multidirectional view’ in which ‘the on many technical and historiographical strands that may be “successful” stages in the development are not the only examined in more depth by future scholars. ones’ (1984: 411), and note that ‘it is clear that a historical account founded on the retrospective success of the artefact leaves much untold’ (1984: 406). 1. INTRODUCTION This article, then, attempts to clarify a small, ‘sub-history’ within broader field. I do not seek to set out a the- The VCS3,1 launched by Electronic Music Studios oretical model within the Social Construction of (London) Ltd in November 1969 (Cary 1969a; Technology. Rather, I want to present merely an Anonymous 3 1969), was Europe’s first commercially enhanced close-up within the larger picture of synthesiser produced synthesiser. A compact and modestly priced history, while bearing in mind the models and insights package, it sported an array of sound-producing and provided by the above-mentioned writers, and locate the sound-modifying devices that could be freely inter- VCS3’s development in the context of the contemporary connected, and offered real-time physical interaction British electronic music scene in the late 1960s. via its complement of knobs, button and joystick X-Y One of the difficulties when delving into the history controller (Figure 1). of EMS and its products 40 to 50 years after the fact is Almost 50 years on, despite being technologically the relative paucity of extant contemporary doc- ‘obsolete’ (a highly contestable term), and readily umentation and primary source material.3 Most of the available in a number of virtual manifestations, the office, factory and personal correspondence, internal VCS3 has assumed a surprisingly bright glow in the memoranda and material relating to the development firmament of treasured analogue synthesisers. Original of the instruments has been lost or destroyed. While a models command astonishingly high prices on eBay.2 fair amount of technical documentation has survived, In this article I shall outline how this device came into there are very few records concerning the design pro- being, and some of the factors that went into its design. cess of EMS products. Most discussions of this nature The complex interactions between aesthetics, society are likely to have taken place informally and orally; and technology with respect to electronic musical consequently, the researcher must draw heavily on the instruments have been examined over the last 20 years recollections of the surviving parties – whose mem- or so by a number of commentators and theorists (e.g. ories, even with the best of intentions, may be unreli- Pinch and Trocco 1996, 2002; Théberge 1997; Patteson able – and try to divine or reconstruct a plausible and 2016), drawing on more generalised models provided consistent narrative from them. As such, one must 1The synthesiser has, through its history, been variously labelled as acknowledge that there are limits to the accuracy of ‘V.C.S. 3’, ‘VCS-3’, ‘VCS 3’ and ‘VCS3’. The last of these is the most any account of the development of EMS devices. common, and the simplest, which is why I have opted for it. 2For example, a VCS3 sold for $18,995 (c.£13,700) on eBay in March 2016. Another was, as of 8 December 2016, for sale at £10,300: www. 3Pinch and Trocco encountered similar difficulties in their research rlmusic.co.uk/rlm3/ems-vcs3-mk1/. on the Moog synthesiser (Pinch and Trocco 1996: 68). Organised Sound 22(2): 217–227 © Cambridge University Press, 2017. doi:10.1017/S1355771817000127 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 28 Sep 2021 at 18:51:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771817000127 218 James Gardner Figure 1. The EMS Putney (VCS3) synthesiser and The Cricklewood keyboard, 1970. Photo courtesy of Robin Wood/EMS Archives. Overviews of EMS of varying reliability may be superseded his earlier attempts at automated sound- found in many publications (e.g. Manning 1985: control (Manning 1985: 235; Zinovieff 2010; Dowson 235–9; Pinch and Trocco 2002: 276–301; Bate 2006; 2014). Gardner 2016; Helliwell 2016: 183–9) and need not be David Cockerell first entered Zinovieff’s orbit rehearsed here, but it is worth limning the three main around September 1966, building custom hardware for players behind the company. the composer’s expanding studio (Cockerell 2014a). Cockerell was (and remains) a brilliant, practical, goal- orientated electronics engineer, and unlike Zinovieff, 2. EMS: BACKGROUND AND DRAMATIS his musical sympathies – both as listener and as PERSONAE amateur player – lay more with contemporary popular music than with the electronic art-music of the time Peter Zinovieff had set up an electronic music studio in (Cockerell 2000, 2010; Pinch and Trocco 2002: 288). Ebury Street, London by 1963 (Anonymous 1 1963; It is not entirely clear when Tristram Cary was Oram 1963; Davies 1968: 166–7), and moved his initially contacted by Peter Zinovieff but it appears to equipment into a purpose-built structure in his garden have been in late 1966, when Cary was preparing his at 49 Deodar Road, Putney at the end of 1965 music for Expo ’67 (Cary n.d.; Smart 2009: 80). In this (Derbyshire 1965). Zinovieff’s interests in controlled three-person team, Cary functioned as something randomness, probability and sequencing led him to purchase, in mid-1967, a DEC PDP-8/S computer in ‘ ’4 (F'note continued) order to act as a sort of super-sequencer that ‘sequencers’ himself in c.1964 using Post Office uniselectors; the second, an electronic ‘stochastic sequencer’, was built c.1966 by 4Zinovieff had two generations of ‘sequential controllers’ before Mark Dowson with help from Humphrey Evans (Zinovieff 2010, the arrival of the PDP-8/S. He built his first electromechanical 2016; Dowson 2014; Gardner 2016: 59–60). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 28 Sep 2021 at 18:51:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771817000127 The Don Banks Music Box to The Putney: The genesis and development of the VCS3 synthesiser 219 of a middleman between, or as a counterbalance to, even by US standards […] and allowing for the devalued Zinovieff and Cockerell. Cary had considerable skills pound and other burdens on the importer they are quite in conventional instrumental composition, and had out of the question for most British customers. In any case provided electronic music and sound effects for films we have our own brilliant designers who would produce and television, including Doctor Who. He had been better and cheaper systems if they turned their attention to active in the electronic music field since the late 1940s it. (Cary 1968) and had built his own studio in Fressingfield, in I contend that when Cary refers to ‘our own brilliant Norfolk (Cary 1992: xvi–xxviii; Smart 2009: 30–75). designers’, he actually meant David Cockerell, and It would be fair to say that in the EMS team Cary that the task of producing ‘better and cheaper systems’ functioned as a bluff, pragmatic foil to the blue-sky was one to which Cary and Zinovieff were already thinking of Zinovieff, who was more of an animateur turning their attention in principle, if not in practice. and conceptualist. By early 1969, Zinovieff was ima- By August 1968, then, the three main characters, or gining a time when the computer would be able to reagents, of EMS were in place, and it seems likely that be taught ‘the real meaning of words as complicated, sooner or later they would have produced some kind of say, as “catharsis” and respond to them musically’ commercially available electronic music equipment; (Zinovieff 1969: 169). Such flights of fancy were rather partly to fill the obvious gap in the market that Cary removed from the deadlines and briefs that Cary had had identified, and partly to finance the Putney studio. to meet as a busy freelance composer. But we have to But in the autumn of that year, a catalyst arrived to be careful here, and bear in mind that Zinovieff had speed up the process: Australian composer Don Banks. hand-soldered much of the cabling in his studios and Banks had been in the UK since 1950 (Hair 2007: 7, 19). had also, perforce, become a computer programmer Like Tristram Cary, he was by necessity a pragmatic, (Zinovieff 2010, 2016).

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